The African Slave Program and why some Nigerians hate #BuyNaijaToGrowTheNaira
By David Hundeyin
For the past few days, the Nigerian social media space has been taken over by a phenomenon called #BuyNaijaToGrowTheNaira. Driven largely by the online interaction of Mr Ben Murray-Bruce, a Nigerian Senator, the message urging Nigerians to buy local products and services over imports has been furiously hash tagged, tweeted, retweeted and liked several thousand times.
The idea behind the campaign is that at a time when the Naira is under unprecedented pressure and the divergence between its official exchange rate and the parallel rate is higher than ever before, Nigerian consumers, businesses and governments can ease a lot of the pressure on the Naira by making sure that they do not import what is already available locally. The message is clear – take personal responsibility for the economic situation of the country and try not to let your purchasing decisions put unnecessary pressure on the Naira.
In the midst of what would seem to be a clearly logical solution to an immediate issue, several voices ranging from unemployed graduates to business leaders to academic leaders and even people in government have arisen, denouncing the “Buy Nigerian” movement. According to them, they are being “forced” to buy Nigerian products and these products are of “lower quality” than their imported substitutes.
Before going any further in deconstructing this self-defeating mindset, it is important to situate these reactions in a historical context, lest they appear to be puerile or ridiculous. The country of Nigeria, both as a nation and as a geographical entity is a colonial creation of the now-defunct British empire. The entire purpose of the creation of Nigeria was to serve the purpose of a British state-sanctioned resource expropriation outfit known as the Royal Niger Trading Company.
The British, like the French, the Belgians, the Portuguese, the Germans and the Spanish never intended for their African subjects to gain independence or determine their own destiny. As a result, the thrust of their entire colonial policy was not just to steal and evacuate resources to fund the economic expansion of Europe, but also to destroy the mental integrity of the “natives” and make them incapable of becoming a political or economic threat to the occupiers in future. These policies of brainwashing and group mentacide are often referred to as the African Slave Program. There are several recorded instances of such African colonial policies in writing and this is one of them here.
The accident of circumstance made it such that before the stated colonial policy of complete dehumanisation and destruction of all cultural identity could take its full course, European colonial occupiers were driven out of Africa and as at today, every single one of Africa’s 53 sovereign nations has flag independence. The reality however, is that the colonial ‘Slave Programming’ policy did not go away with the colonisers. It remained here in Nigeria with our parents and grandparents, and now it is here with us.
The colonists understood very well that it is impossible to enslave a people forever if the enslavement is that of externally visible restrictions, chains and oppression. If however, it was possible to create a program in the minds of the enslaved people that would make their enslavement self-propagating, then you would have a visibly “free” and “independent” population of hereditary slaves.
That population is us.
Many, if not most of those we consider to be academic, political, cultural, military and economic leaders in Nigeria were trained and brainwashed directly by the British. This includes our prominent entrepreneurs, Vice-Chancellors, Cabinet Ministers, Governors, traditional leaders and military officers. Most of us are one or at best two generations removed from the primary slave programming administered upon Nigeria and the rest of Africa. Thus, a lot of the behaviours and thoughts we project unconsciously everyday are a direct result of the undisturbed and uninhibited slave program currently wreaking havoc on our collective mind.
One of the symptoms of the slave programming is our voluntary economic suicide. In a country that is well-documented for having just one major source of government income – a percentage of proceeds from the sale of unrefined crude oil by a private company that openly boasts about having more power than the government – we already know that our currency is always under pressure even without low oil prices. We also know that other countries are not willing or able to offer us economic refuge if we succeed in stifling our economy until it implodes.
That does not stop us from importing everything under the sun, from Chinese sunshades to Turkish chocolate to German cars and everything in between. We already know that the capacity to produce most of these consumer items already exists in Nigeria. Will that stop us from actively and knowingly looking out to purchase the import over the local product wherever possible? No it will not. We know very well that those “imported Italian leather” shoes we pay N6,000 for at Balogun Market add nothing to our existence. That does not stop us from prancing around in the “Gucci” shoes and feeding our horifically petty sense of self-importance with our “imported shoes.”
We know very well that there is no sense in exporting the jobs we do not have to the countries that have more jobs than citizens, who will never open their borders to us either to trade or to seek employment. We know all this very well. We even know that from a purely economic point of view, knowingly and deliberately substituting local production in favour of imports as we do everyday destroys our balance of trade and our balance of payments which reflects in the sliding exchange rate.
Now that reduced oil revenues have made the customary artificial Naira defense by the CBN nearly impossible, we understand that the only thing standing between us and a rapid slide into borderline hyperinflation is immediate import substitution to reduce foreign exchange demand as much as possible. Oh yeah. We know this. But does it matter that we know? Will it make a difference to our behaviour and consumption habits?
Exhibits A and B above tell the story.
The average Nigerian, when told that their consumption habits need to change for the common good will become fiercely defensive and claim that they are being “forced” to “buy Nigerian”. This same Nigerian is well aware of the fact that China – the country whose development model every African country claims to be emulating – closed its import market for decades until its internal production capacity and technology could match that of imports. #BuyNaijaToGrowTheNaira does not even advocate for banning imports, but merely for Nigerians to modify their consumption habits. Yet from student to vice-chancellor; from corporal to Major-General, adisturbing Nigerian tendency is to engage in the sort of willful disingenuity of Prof. Akin Oyebode in the article above.
The raw and unpalatable truth is that there is no such thing as a “free” market and a “developing” country can not achieve industrial development through Western-approved “free trade”, notwithstanding the many cliches and fluff from the likes of Ernst & Young and Deloitte. This arbitrary assertion from McKinsey for example –
“Manufacturing takes off when a country’s average income crosses $5,000 and continues to surge till $10,000, when higher wages increase production costs.”
Who decided this? Was this how it happened in China or in South Korea or in Taiwan? Did the Chinese wait for their average per capita income to hit $5,000 before their manufacturing took off in earnest? Or was it in fact their manufacturing that pushed the per capita income to that figure?
This is the power of the African Slave Program when left unchecked. It reduces the minds of its victims to merely a collection of cliches, instructions and self-defeating circular thinking. It also makes vastly learned and experienced people believe unreservedly that the pronouncements of a European economist in Gelsenkirchen who cannot pronounce your name or locate you on a map, are holy truths from God.
Renowned economist Ha Joon Chang has made the point for decades that everyone protects their market using barriers to entry. British writer George Monbiot has also written extensively on the myth of “free market development” which Prof. Oyebode unfortunately insists on propagating despite the fact that he is surely in a position to know better.
Here is an instructive section of an article on this subject by George Mobiot:
Britain’s industrial revolution was founded upon the textile industry. This was nurtured and promoted by means of ruthless government intervention…From the 14th Century onwards, the British state systematically cut out its competitors, by taxing or banning the import of foreign manufactures and banning the export of the raw materials (wool and unfinished cloth) to countries with competing industries…Only when Britain had established technological superiority in almost every aspect of manufacturing did it suddenly discover the virtues of free trade. It was not until the 1850s and 1860s that we opened most of our markets.
The United States, which now insists that no nation can develop without free trade, defended its markets just as aggressively during its key development phase. In 1816 the tax on almost all imported manufactures was 35%, rising to 40% in 1820 and, for some goods, 50% in 1832.2…Before the war ended, Abraham Lincoln raised import taxes to the highest level they had ever reached. The US remained the most heavily protected nation on earth until 1913. Throughout this period, it was also the fastest-growing.
The point is clear enough. There are three classes of people on earth today – the producers who have used every ethical and unethical tactic to gain their advantage; the aspiring producers who are trying to break into the first group, and finally the consumers who have been mentally programmed by colonial systems to forever remain dependent and exploited. The African Slave Program is not an esoteric myth, neither is it some kind of diabolical expression of racial hatred from Whites to Blacks – it is an economic and political asset used by one group of people to maintain their dominance over another.
If Nigeria wants to ever become something more than the import-dependent banana republic it is, exporting raw materials and importing cars, champagne and private jets, #BuyNaijaToGrowTheNaira is the least – the very least – of the kind of effort that needs to be made. If you are a Nigerian who wants to have a future as a fully-recognised citizen of a functioning country, and not a perennial refugee from a failed state like many Somalis have been for the past two decades, then the onus is on you to acknowledge and consciously work against your African Slave Programming.
If you choose not to, nobody can “force” you to do otherwise. It is a democracy after all. No one can “force” you to do what is in your own economic interest – and it is impossible to enforce even if they tried to. Bear in mind however, that decisions have real consequences. The world out there is a crocodile tank just biding its time, waiting for Nigeria to cave in on itself – and if our first colonisation was terrible, the second will be unimaginable.
If anything, the evidence would suggest that rather than chase Dr. Oyebode’s chimera of development by “driving innovation, efficiency and competition”, Nigeria should right now be desperately seeking to grow its capacity to produce what it consumes and become self-sufficient in the time window we still have before oil is rendered worthless by cheap and abundant alternative energy – and it is going to happen soon.
The well-indoctrinated subject of ASP is not able to endure delayed gratification or lessened consumption. He or she has nothing but scorn and disdain for concepts such as patriotism, nationalism and altruism. The only thing important to them is their immediate personal gratification, and this is because the creators of ASP wished to socially engineer a society that would forever fail to function on its own as its component people remain unable to work on a micro level toward a common purpose.
If you care in any way at all about the survival of Nigeria, Africa and African people in general wherever they are on the planet, you must do whatever is within your power to resist the African Slave Programming we have all received.
Nothing else matters..
